Interview: David France of 'How to Survive a Plague'

For filmmaker David France, the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s needs a lot more films like his How to Survive a Plague.

The Oscar-nominated film documents the battle to increase awareness of AIDS and its devastating impact on the gay community in the U.S. — a community so marginalized that advocating for research of the disease was difficult, no matter how many people it was killing.

France says one reason he made the documentary was to assert the gay activist movement as an important one in American history.

"The first thing I wanted to do when I started working on the film was to
put it on the shelf with those great American social justice movements
and teach people how significant it was for American lives, to canonize
it," he says in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.